Elizabeth Edwards, Political Wife and Author, Dies

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, has died after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 61. People magazine had just reported that Edwards had stopped treatments for cancer because her doctors said that it would be unproductive.

Edwards wrote about her feelings about faith, illness and death in her book “Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities”:

“How rare it must be for someone to say, ‘I deserve this cancer; it is a proper punishment for my sins,’ or even more unlikely, ‘God was right to take my child for I am not pious.’ We all have to redraw lines and rearrange our expectations of faith in these moments, and it is understandable that we do not come to rest with precisely the same understanding.”